The False Promises Of Two Percent Price Inflation

A specter is haunting the world, the specter of two percent inflationism. Whether pronounced by the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, or from the Bank of Japan, many monetary central planners have declared their determination to impose a certain minimum of rising prices on their societies and economies.

One of the oldest of economic fallacies continues to dominate and guide the thinking of monetary policy makers: that printing money is the magic elixir for the creating of sustainable prosperity.

In the eyes of those with their hands on the handle of the monetary printing press the economic system is like a balloon that, if not “fully inflated” at a desired level of output and employment, should be simply “pumped up” with the hot air of monetary “stimulus.”

The Fallacy of Keynesian Macro-Aggregates

The fallacy is the continuing legacy of the British economist, John Maynard Keynes, and his conception of “aggregate demand failures.” Keynes argued that the economy should be looked at in terms of series of macroeconomic aggregates: total demand for all output as a whole, total supply of all resources and goods as a whole, and the average general levels of all prices and wages for goods and services and resources potentially bought and sold on the overall market.

If at the prevailing general level of wages, there is not enough “aggregate demand” for output as a whole to profitably employ all those interested and willing to work, then it is the task of the government and its central bank to assure that sufficient money spending is injected into the economy. The idea being that at rising prices for final goods and services relative to the general wage level, it again becomes profitable for businesses employ the unemployed until “full employment” is restored.

Over the decades since Keynes first formulated this idea in his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, both his supporters and apparent critics have revised and reformulated parts of his argument and assumptions. But the general macro-aggregate framework and worldview used by economists in the context of which problems of less than full employment continue to be analyzed, nonetheless, still tends to focus on and formulate government policy in terms of the levels of and changes in output and employment for the economy as a whole.

In fact, however, there are no such things as “aggregate demand,” or “aggregate supply,” or output and employment “as a whole.” These are statistical creations constructed by economists and statisticians, out of what really exists: the demands and supplies of multitudes of individual and distinct goods and services produced, and bought and sold on the various distinct markets that comprise the economic system of society.

The Market’s Many Demands and Supplies

There are specific consumer demands for different kinds and types of hats, shoes, shirts, reading glasses, apples, and books or movies. But none of us just demands “output,” any more than there is just a creation of “employment.”

When we go into the marketplace we are interested in buying the specific goods and services for which we have particular and distinct demands. And businessmen and entrepreneurs find it profitable to hire and employ particular workers with specific skills to assist in the manufacture, production, marketing and sale of the distinct goods that we as individual consumers are interested in purchasing.

In turn, each of these individual and distinct goods and services has its own particular price in the market place, established by the interaction of the individual demanders with the individual suppliers offering them for sale.

The profitable opportunities to bring desired goods to market results in the demand for different resources and raw materials, specific types of machinery and equipment, and different categories of skilled and lesser skilled individual workers to participate in the production processes that bring those desired goods into existence.

The interactions between the individual businessmen and the individual suppliers of these factors of production generate the prices for their purchase, hire or employment on, again, multitudes of individual markets in the economic system.

The “macro” economist and his statistician collaborator then proceed to add up, sum and averages all these different individual outputs, employments and specific prices and wages into a series of economy-wide measured aggregates.

But it should be fairly clear that in doing so all the real economic relationships in the market, the actual structure of relative prices and wages, and all the multitude of distinct and interconnected patterns of actual demands and supplies are submerged and lost in the macro-economic aggregates and totals.

Balanced Markets Assure Full Employment

Balanced production and sustainable employments in the economy as a whole clearly requires coordination and balance between the demands and supplies of all the particular goods and services in each of the specific markets on which they are bought and sold. And parallel to this there must be comparable coordination and balance between the businessmen’s demands for resources, capital equipment and different types of labor in each production sector of the market and those supplying them.

Such coordination, balance, and sustainable employment requires adaptation to the every-changing circumstance of market conditions through adjustment of prices and wages, and to shifts in supplies and demands in and between the various parts and sectors of the economy.

In other words, it is these rightly balanced and coordinated patterns between supplies and demands and their accompanying structures of relative prices and wages that assure “full employment” and efficient and effective use of available resources and capital, so entrepreneurs and businessmen are constantly and continuously tending to produce the goods we, the consumers, want and desire, and at prices that are covering competitive costs of production.

All this is lost from view when reduced to that handful of macro-aggregates of “total demand” and “total supply” and a statistical average price level for all goods relative to a statistical average wage level for all workers in the economy.

The Keynesian Government “Big Spender”

In this simplified and, indeed, simplistic view Keynesian-type view of things all that needs to be done from the government’s policy perspective is to run budget deficits or create money through the banking system to push up “aggregate demand” to assure a targeted rise in the general price level so profit-margins “in general” are widened relative to the general wage level so employment “in general” will be expanded.

We can think of government as a “big spender” who comes into a town and proceeds to increase “aggregate demand” in this community by buying goods. Prices for final output rise, profit margins are widened relative to the general wage level and other general cost-prices. Private businesses, in general, employ more workers, purchase or hire other inputs, and “aggregate supply” expands to a point of desired “full employment.”

The presumption on the part of the center bankers in targeting a rate of an average annual price inflation of two percent is that while selling prices are to be pushed up at this average annual rate through monetary expansion, the average level of cost prices (including money wages in general) will not rise or not by the same percentage increase as the average increase in the “price level.”

If cost prices in general (including money wages) were to rise at the same rate as the price level, there would be no margin of additional profits to stimulate greater aggregate output and employment.

Market Anticipations Undermine Keynes’ Assumptions

The fallacy in thinking that cost-prices in general will permanently lag behind the rate of increase in the price level of final goods and services was pointed out long ago, in 1898, by the famous Swedish economist, Knut Wicksell:

“If a gradual rise in prices, in accordance with an approximately known schedule, could be reckoned on with certainty, it would be taken into account in all current business contracts; with the result that its supposed beneficial influence would necessarily be reduced to a minimum.

“Those people who prefer a continually upward moving to a stationary price level forcibly remind one of those who purposely keep their watches a little fast so as to be more certain of catching their train. But to achieve their purpose they must not be conscious or remain conscious of the fact that their watches are fast; otherwise they become accustomed to take the extra few minutes into account, and so after all, in spite of their artfulness, arrive too late . . .”

Yellen and the Fed goes wrong cartoon

The Government “Big Spender” Unbalances Markets

But the more fundamental error and misconception in the macro-aggregate approach is its failure to appreciate and focus on the real impact of changes in the money supply that by necessity result in an unsustainable deviation of prices, profits, and resources and labor uses from a properly balanced coordination, the end result of which is more of the very unemployment that the monetary “stimulus” was meant to cure.

Let’s revert to our example of the “big spender” who comes into a town. The townspeople discover that our big spender introduces a greater demand into the community, but not for “goods in general.” Instead, he announces his intention of building a new factory on the outskirts of the town.

He leases a particular piece of land and pays for the first few months rent. He hires a particular construction company to build the factory, and the construction company in turn increases its demand not only for workers to do the work, but orders new equipment, that, in turn, results in the equipment manufacturers adding to their workforce to fulfill the new demand for construction machinery.

Our big spender, trumpeting the wonders for the community from his new spending, starts hiring clerical staff and sales personal in anticipation of fulfilling orders once the factory is completed and producing its new output.

The new and higher incomes earned by the construction and machinery workers, as well as the newly employed clerical and sales workers raise the demand for various and specific consumer and other goods upon which these people want to spend their new and increased wages.

The businesses in the town catering to these particular increased consumer demands now attempt to expand their supplies and, perhaps, hire more retail store employees.

Over time the prices of all of these goods and services will start to rise, but not at the same time or to the same degree. They will go up in a temporal sequence that more or less tends to match the pattern and sequence of the changed demands for those goods and services resulting from the new money injected by the “big spender” into this community.

Inflationary Spending Has to Continue and Increase

Now, whether some of the individual workers drawn into this specific pattern of new employments were previously unemployed or whether they had to be attracted away from existing jobs they already held in other parts of the market, the fact remains that their continued employments in these particular jobs is dependent on the “big spender” continuing to inject and spend his new money, period-after-period of time, in the same way and in sufficient amounts of dollar spending to assure that the workers he has drawn into his factory project are not attracted to other employments due to the rise in all of these alternative or other demands, as well.

If the interdependent patterns of demands and supplies, and the structure of interconnected relative prices and wages generated by the big spender’s spending are to be maintained, his injection of new money into the community must continue, and at an increasing rate of spending if they are not be fall apart.

An alternative imagery might be the dropping of a pebble or stone into a pond of water. From the epicenter where the stone has hit the surface of the water a sequence of ripples will be sent out which will be reversed when the ripples finally hit the surrounding shore, and will then finally come to rest when there is no longer any new disturbances affecting the surface of the pond.

But if the pattern of ripples created are to be sustained, new pebbles or stones must be continuously dropped into the pond and with increasing force if the resulting counter-waves coming back from the shore are not to disrupt and overwhelm the ripple pattern moving out from the original epicenter.

Yellen and the Good Ship Fed cartoon

The “Austrian” Analysis of Inflation

It is no doubt that this way of analyzing and understanding the dynamics of how monetary expansion affects market activities is more complex and complicated than the simplistic Keynesian-style of macro-aggregate analysis. But as the famous Austrian-born economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter emphasized:

“The Austrian way of emphasizing the behavior or decisions of individuals and of defining the exchange value of money with respect to individual commodities rather than with respect to a price level of one kind or another has its merits, particularly in the analysis of an inflationary process; it tends to replace a simple but inadequate picture by one which is less clear-cut but more realistic and richer in results.”

And, indeed, it is this “Austrian” analysis of monetary expansion and its resulting impact on prices, employment and production, especially as developed in the 20th century by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, that explains why the Keynesian-originated macro-aggregate approach is fundamentally flawed.

As Hayek once explained the logic of the monetary inflationary process:

“The influx of the additional money into the [economic] system always takes place at some particular points. There will always be some people who have more money to spend before the others. Who these people are will depend on the particular manner in which the increase in the money stream is being brought about . . .

“It may be spent in the first instance by government on public works or increased salaries, or it may be first spent by investors mobilizing cash balances for borrowing for that purpose; it may be spent in the first instance on securities, or investment goods, on wages or on consumers’ goods . . .

“The process will take very different forms according to the initial source or sources of the additional money stream . . . But one thing all these different forms of the process will have in common: that the different prices will rise, not at the same time but in succession, and that so long as the process continues some prices will always be ahead of others and the whole structure of relative prices therefore will be very different from what the pure theorist describes as an equilibrium position.”

An inflationary process, in other words, brings about distortions, mismatches, and imbalanced relationships between different supplies and demands, and the relationships between the structure of relative prices and wages that only last for as long as the inflationary process continues, and often only at an accelerating rate.

Or as Hayek expressed it on a different occasion:

“Any attempt to create full employment by drawing labor into occupations where they will remain employed only so long as the [monetary and] credit expansion continues creates the dilemma that either credit expansion must continue indefinitely (which means inflation), or that, when it stops unemployment will be greater than it would be if the temporary increase in employment had never taken place.”

The Inflationary “Cure” Creates More Market Problems

Once the inflationary monetary expansion ends or is slowed down, it is discovered that the artificially created supply and demand patterns and relative price and wage structure are inconsistent with non-inflationary market conditions.

In our example of the “big spender,” one day the townsfolk discover that he was really a con artist who had only phony counterfeit money to spend, and whose deceptive promises and temporary spending drew them into in all of those specific and particular activities and employments. They now find out that the construction projects began cannot be completed, the employments created cannot be maintained, and the investments started in response to the phony money the big spender injected into this community cannot be completed or continued.

Many of the townspeople now have to stop what they had been doing, and try to discover other demanders, other employers and other possible investment opportunities in the face of the truth of the big spenders false incentives to do things they should not have been doing from the start.

The unemployment and under utilization of resources that “activist” monetary policy by governments are supposed to reduce, in fact, set the stage for an inescapable readjustment period of more unemployment and temporary idle resources, when many of the affected supplies and demands have to be rebalanced at newly established market-based prices if employments and productions are to be sustainable and consistent with actual consumer demands and the availability of scarce resources in the post-inflationary environment.

Thus, recessions are the inevitable result from prior and unsustainable inflationary booms. And even the claimed “modest” and “controlled” rate of two percent annual price inflation that has become the new panacea for economic stability and growth in the minds of central bankers, brings in its wake a “wrong twist” to many of the micro-economic supply and demand and price-wage relationships that are the substance of the real economy beneath the superficial macro-aggregates.

Governments and their monetary central planners, therefore, are the cause and not the solution to the instabilities and hardships of inflations and recessions. To end them, political control and manipulation of the money and banking systems will have to be abolished.

[This piece first appeared here:]